Distortions
Hey South Creek Family,
This past Sunday we continued our series Distortions: Naming the Things That Keep People From the Real Jesus, and this week we named one of the most common ones: Christians are hypocrites.
Here's the truth underneath it: hypocrisy is receiving grace and refusing to give it. We talked about two kinds. There's obvious hypocrisy — when we know exactly what's right and choose the opposite anyway. And there's oblivious hypocrisy, the kind we don't even see, because it's just what we've always known and no one's ever shown us otherwise. Either way, the result is the same: people are told one thing about Jesus — grace, love, mercy, a seat at the table — and then experience something else entirely from us.
We looked at Mark 2, where Jesus sits down to eat with tax collectors and sinners — the very people everyone else had decided didn't belong. When the religious leaders objected, Jesus answered simply:
"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
Jesus never ranked people by how acceptable their sin looked from the outside. We often do — and when people notice that gap, it doesn't just disappoint them, it disorients them. It makes them wonder if anything they've heard about Jesus is even true.
We closed with the story of a servant who was forgiven an impossible debt and then refused to forgive someone who owed him almost nothing. The king's question is the one we are left with:
"Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?"
That question doesn't stay in the room. Whether you've been the one withholding grace — on purpose or without even realizing it — or you're carrying a wound from someone else's hypocrisy, the real Jesus is still at the table, still extending mercy he doesn't owe, still inviting you to come as you are.
May this week you choose to remove the planks from your eyes so that you and others can see Him more clearly.
-Pastor Aaron Perry